1. Technical Field
This application generally relates to mobile wireless communication devices capable of storing, sending and receiving text messages that can be part of a thread of related messages exchanged between multiple parties.
2. Related Art
Wireless communication devices of various types and configurations are now common place. Many of these devices are capable of sending, storing and receiving text messages between two or more people which constitute a form of conversation between them about a given topic (or which possess some other common feature which causes a series of such individual messages to be interrelated, e.g., such as question and answer, further question, further answer, etc.). Such sequences of related individual messages are commonly referred to as a “thread” of interrelated messages.
For continuity, typically each exchange in such a thread of messages includes the cumulative earlier original message and all interrelated subsequent earlier replies as a part of the next or current message. That is, a thread of messages is typically treated as an object entity which means that the size of the object continually increases as the thread continues to grow.
In systems where a central message control server may have its own store of prior communicated message objects, it has been recognized that communication bandwidth may be economized by having the wireless device transmit only an abbreviated individual reply or forward message command to the server where the entire message thread object to be included with the reply or forward can be reconstructed. For example, see our copending application Ser. No. 11/002,583 filed Dec. 3, 2004 entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EFFICIENTLY MANAGING “MESSAGES SENT” FILE AND RESENDING OF MESSAGES FROM MOBILE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION DEVICE. If economy is attempted in the other direction by sending only an individual message of a thread from the server to the wireless device, then a MORE command may be issued if additional messages in the thread are needed at the wireless device.
However, at present, all messages, on at least some devices, are received, stored and sent as independent objects. Message threads (e.g., groups of emails on the same subject) are correlated on the device, but no mechanism is used to compress the redundant data included in each subsequent message on that thread or in the local memory required to store such message thread objects. Even if the server “knows” that the device already has particular messages stored thereat, there has in the past been no reliable mechanism to tell the device to use some earlier message (e.g., an “original message”) as part of the current message, (similar to how message replies and forwards from the device may be reconstructed at the server). Further, when MORE is requested from one message in the thread, that data will not appear when looking at a subsequent reply to that thread.
The current method leads to several inefficiencies, e.g.:                a) data storage is redundant (i.e., in most cases only the reply/forward text is required, not the original text);        b) requesting MORE on the original message (or on any reply within that thread) does not also update the display of any other message within that thread; and        c) transmission bandwidth required for sending message threads from the server to the device are significantly greater than necessary (e.g., if the server were to transmit only a reference to an original message which it knows that the device already has).        